NFL Blitz 99 issues

Okay, I have two NFL Blitz 99 boards now. The first one worked fine for several months before starting to freeze during the attract mode. I bought a second one, and hooked it up to the hard drive from the first one, and it seemed fine the first time I powered it on. Now, after leaving it on for longer and letting it run through the attract mode, it freezes or experiences a text glitch, similar to what the other one did.

Could my hard drive be the problem here? Am I just that unlucky that I've got two bad boards? Or should I look at other things such as voltage? (several other games have run in this cabinet for hours with no trouble whatsoever. I find an issue with the power supply rather hard to picture, but am open to ideas)

For what it's worth, I thought the first one had died due to the board being flexed. However, this second one has been babied in the time it's been in my possession - I kept it sitting flat, stored away safely, until I was able to mount the PCB on plywood.


I'm open to thoughts or suggestions - please let me know if you have any.

Thanks

-Collin

Check the voltage to the hard drive, if it's good then you need to replace the hard drive. A lot of people are using flash drives instead now days, maybe that's the reason why.

What should voltage to the HD be, and which pins of the HD power connector should I use to check?

Thanks James!

Should only be 5 pins I think. Doesn't an HD use both +5v and +12v?

There's 4, I believe (could be 5)

My housemate is in Cleveland for the weekend - he's a big computer guy. I'll see if he knows when he gets back tomorrow night.

The +5v probably needs to be adjusted since I had experienced similar issues with an Area 51: Site 4 hd in the past. If it continues to be an issue, you made need a new Hd or convert over to a flash drive as Xian Xi suggested. If the game is firing up properly at the start, that should rule out any main pcb issues.

Do you need a new boot ROM to convert to flash? My Blitz 99 refuses to work with a CF card - it hangs at the part where it's reading the HD Cache.

RJ

Arcademan said:

The +5v probably needs to be adjusted since I had experienced similar issues with an Area 51: Site 4 hd in the past. If it continues to be an issue, you made need a new Hd or convert over to a flash drive as Xian Xi suggested. If the game is firing up properly at the start, that should rule out any main pcb issues.

Click to expand...

Awesome. I don't have a multimeter handy (moved out on my own like a year ago, parents life a mile or two away so I can just borrow my dad's when I need until I find one cheap) so I'll borrow it tomorrow if I get a chance and see what the voltage looks like.

Thanks for the input!

Collin

They're like $15-20 from Sears.

For a decent one? If so, I'll just pick one up there.

Just make sure that it is a digital meter and that it has a continuity test function.

Arcademan said:

The +5v probably needs to be adjusted since I had experienced similar issues with an Area 51: Site 4 hd in the past. If it continues to be an issue, you made need a new Hd or convert over to a flash drive as Xian Xi suggested. If the game is firing up properly at the start, that should rule out any main pcb issues.

Click to expand...

This turned out to be the issue. As the guys on KLOV explained to me, some of the Midway boards suck up more power (ones from certain manufacture locations are worse than others, due to different PCBs) Thanks so much for your help!

little offtopic here, but didnt the NFL blitz games use a 3DFX GPU similar to the voodoo card?

They used the Voodoo1 chipset.